How to Find Your Competitor’s Pricing: Step by Step Guide
Almost every competitor analysis project includes a requirement to find competitor pricing. Many software companies list some pricing online (which makes it easy to find competitor pricing for whatever tier they publicize), but usually don’t publish their enterprise pricing, and this is the pricing that is of most interest. Similarly, there is price monitoring software for competitor price tracking, but again such software only covers public pricing data. They may be useful for pricing trends, for being alerted to pricing changes that may also signal similar changes at enterprise level. But the pricing information that is of most value is the unpublished competitor pricing data that applies to enterprise accounts. Sales teams compete mostly on enterprise accounts (or the upper end of SMBs), and need to know what they are up against.
Sales teams need list price and post-discount price, they need to know the units of pricing (e.g. per instance, per GB, etc) and the range of SKUs. This is all information that goes to building a competitive pricing strategy – finding a price point aggressive enough to win market share but strong enough to preserve your profit margin. Wholly competitor based pricing may not be a good idea, but pricing intelligence, including competitor pricing information, is one important input into a competitive pricing strategy.
Competitive pricing analysis is one of the most difficult types of market research projects to conduct. Primary fieldwork is essential, but there are some clues about pricing that can be had via secondary research from public sources.
Primary fieldwork
We can’t replicate primary fieldwork in this article. Primary research for competitor price analysis involves talking to people who might know some competitor data. For example, employees of the competitor - particularly salespeople - will know pricing. Partners of the competitor - particularly resellers - will also know pricing. Customers (and prospects) of the competitor will know pricing, whether from proposals they received or from what they are currently paying. And so on. These are the kind of sources we might use for a real competitor analysis project, and they are very important for competitor pricing research , where public information may be limited.
Secondary sources
We have to choose an arbitrary “competitor” for this exercise, and we’re choosing Cloudflare , for no particular reason (everyone's competitors will vary, including a range of direct competitors and indirect competitors). Here are the secondary sources we’re going to cycle through as we try to determine Cloudflare's product price points:
Competitor’s website.
Google.
Reseller channel.
Government price lists.
False sources.
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1. Competitor’s website
Cloudflare on its own website shows product price points for some of its lower tiers, but not for enterprise/upper tiers, and not for all lower tiers either. This is typical of software companies – and Cloudflare is more open than most. We will need to look elsewhere for enterprise product pricing.
2. Google
Good old basic Google is the most important research tool for any competitive intelligence project. Competitor pricing is more likely than other information to turn up in unexpected, one-off sources, so searching for these serendipitous datapoints is particularly important. In the case of Cloudflare enterprise product pricing, let’s see what Google finds.
From RevPilots:
This is a good time to comment on the way that some sources recycle numbers from elsewhere. We don’t know where RevPilots got its number from. We hope it’s from asking Cloudflare, but more often than not, such numbers come from another secondary source and without knowing what that other source is, it’s difficult to determine the reliability of the number.
And via Capiche:
Of course, an important part of this secondary data gathering is evaluating the quality and reliability of the pricing intelligence. Are price references from anonymous sources on Reddit reliable? No – you can’t tell your manager (or for us, our client) that your competitor price tracking relies on Reddit. But even low-quality sources can help to reinforce competitor pricing data from more reliable sources, or set broad parameters - for example, from the above half dozen low-quality sources, it seems likely that $2K-$5K is a useful range. We don’t quite know what product/features that covers, but it’s a start.
Elsewhere, we find some discussion by Polka Treasury of their Cloudflare usage and invoices received (for $15,300 over 3 months).
Low quality image as per the original source.
On its own, this might not be helpful because we don’t know how much usage it covers, but Polka discusses that with additional information, providing useful context.
3. Reseller channel
Resellers are an excellent primary source, but can also be a good secondary source. Resellers can be the specific implementation partners of a competitor, generic resellers/distributors such as CDW (with extensive public pricing) or, less usefully, the app stores of platforms such as Salesforce, Shopify, AWS, etc. All of these can provide some level of pricing visibility. In this case, CDW does not show Cloudflare pricing.
For Cloudflare, we find some reseller pricing, via a GSA Advantage search. GSA Advantage aggregates pricing (and other information) offered to US government agencies. That’s not quite the same pricing as offered to commercial clients, but is another useful datapoint for triangulation. Software companies, or more commonly their implementation partners, can file price sheets with GSA in advance of bidding for work.
Another reseller source comes via Bigscoots, a managed service provider for WordPress. Further investigation is needed into what the Bigscoots version of Cloudflare Enterprise means - but again, another datapoint.
4. Government price lists
We’ve already seen one government price list above, from GSA Advantage. The UK equivalent, UK Digital Marketplace, is also very useful. It lists pricing from software companies and their resellers, as offered to UK government agencies. For Cloudflare, we find the following.
Yes, it’s in a different country and different currency but nonetheless, very useful.
5. False sources
When searching for pricing, one of the most common ‘sources’ to appear are low-quality sources. Software review sites are the main culprit.
They are very good in their own realm (reviews) but scraping generic pricing from elsewhere adds little value. Worse, the data can be wrong - e.g. TrustRadius below claims that Cloudflare has no free trial, or premium integration services, both of which claims are wrong. These low-quality sources can almost always be ignored: they only clutter and confuse.
Beyond pricing
The competitor price monitoring in this research above has focused on core software pricing. With enterprise contracts, there will also often be implementation services, support services, training and perhaps other costs – price intelligence that goes beyond core pricing. And there will be significant discounts, for example for term and volume. These are more likely to be found via primary research than public sources, although the cost of services may be available from secondary research. Below is some indicative pricing from Cloudflare itself for its premium support offering (albeit in an unhelpfully large range).
Summary
Finding enterprise software pricing via public sources is an uphill struggle. For many software companies, there is nothing available at all. But for other competitors, the above types of sources will help you find useful clues and price ranges that can provide context for proper primary fieldwork. The effort is worth it for the huge competitive advantage that knowing the competitor pricing strategy gives you. Again, we are not advocating competition based pricing, but competitor price intelligence is one, very important, input into setting your own pricing. Pricing analysis is essential for winning individual deals, growing market share while protecting your profit margin.
The pricing information collected above from public sources still needs extensive processing. Differing price points need to be reconciled. Pricing needs to be mapped to SKUs, volume, etc. Finding such information is just the start. Even after you've pinned down competitor pricing information as accurately as you can, you need to update it regularly, to stay abreast of pricing changes. Price monitoring on a quarterly basis can alert you to a pricing change that affects your own pricing decision.